News — Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle

"This is the third novel by this author about Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler.  As these novels come out, readers find themselves travelling a strange pathway.  Both Sherlock and Irene have developed defenses against caring about others.  Their reasons are different, but their actions are similar.  Both are self-reliant loners who suppress their feelings of care and concern for others lest they be trapped into allowing others to distract them from their own immediate concerns. This novel opens with Irene arriving at 221B Baker Street to inform Sherlock that her bee hives have all died.  At this time, Irene is...

"This book is a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories set in the 21st Century.  They include agents and Rock Stars, cell phones and E-Books and take place in a thoroughly modern world.  They are not written in the style used by Doyle, so this Dr. Watson is not the Watson of the 19th Century.  Instead, Watson is married and is working for a law firm that specializes in “no win, no fee” cases of insurance fraud (Watson’s words). The short story, “Charlie Milverton,” is the only one that was published earlier as it appeared in Sherlock’s Home (Steve Emecz, ed.)  Just as “The Adventure...

"This is a hard book to classify.  It has been my custom to review only books of Sherlockian fiction, since that is my own area of concentration in matters Sherlockian.  This book is neither quite fact nor quite fiction.  “Sutra” is a familiar word to Indians, but to most Western readers, it is only associated with “The Kama Sutra,” a book familiar to them as a ‘sex manual.’  Juxtaposition of this term with Holmes is difficult to reconcile for most Sherlockians outside of Asia. Several definitions of the term are offered in the book, but none really spoke to me,...

"This is the third in the author’s series featuring Jefferson Cody and Sebastian McCabe.   To my taste it seems the best in the series of four.  Events center around the wedding of Jeff Cody and Lynda Teal.  As is customary, we meet again with old acquaintances and run into a group of new ones.  This time we learn more about old friends and meet even more interesting new ones than is usual. Although the upcoming wedding permeates the entire book, this is because the narrator is the groom.  He is, quite naturally, preoccupied with his bride-to-be and is only marginally...

"Synopsis: The Dean of a Swiss university persuades Sherlock Holmes to investigate the background of a would-be lecturer. To Dr. Watson it seems a very humdrum commission - but who is the mysterious ‘Lieserl’? How does her existence threaten the ambitions of the technical assistant level III in Room 86 at the Federal Patents Office in Berne by the name of Albert Einstein? The assignment plunges Holmes and Watson into unfathomable Serbia to solve one of the intractable mysteries of the 20th Century. In Tim Symonds’ previous detective novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Dead Boer At Scotney Castle and Sherlock...